Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [255]
Suddenly Strelnikov began talking about the revolution.
17
“All this is not for you. You won’t understand it. You grew up differently. There was the world of the city’s outskirts, a world of railroad tracks and workmen’s barracks. Filth, overcrowding, destitution, the degradation of man in the laborer, the degradation of women. There was the gleeful, unpunished impudence of depravity, of mama’s boys, well-heeled students, and little merchants. The tears and complaints of the robbed, the injured, the seduced were dismissed with a joke or an outburst of scornful vexation. This was the olympianism of parasites, remarkable only in that they did not trouble themselves about anything, never sought anything, neither gave nor left the world anything!
“But we took up life like a military campaign, we moved mountains for the sake of those we loved. And though we brought them nothing but grief, we did not offend them in the least, because we turned out to be even greater martyrs than they were.
“Before I go on, though, it is my duty to tell you this. The point is the following. You must leave here without delay, if you hold your life dear. The roundup is closing in on me, and whatever its end may be, you’ll be implicated with me, you’re already part of my affair by the fact of our conversation. Besides, there are a lot of wolves here, I shot at them the other day.”
“Ah, so that was you shooting?”
“Yes. You, of course, heard it? I was on my way to another refuge, but before I came to it, I realized by various signs that it had been discovered and the people there had probably been killed. I won’t stay long with you, I’ll just spend the night and leave in the morning. So, then, with your permission, I’ll go on.
“But could it be that Tverskaya-Yamskaya Streets4 and fops in cocked caps and trousers with foot straps racing about with their girls in dashing cabs existed only in Moscow, only in Russia? The street, the evening street, the evening street of that age, the trotters, the dapple grays, existed everywhere. What unified the epoch, what shaped the nineteenth century into a single historical segment? The birth of socialist thought. Revolutions took place, selfless young men mounted the barricades. Publicists racked their brains over how to curb the brutal shamelessness of money and raise up and defend the human dignity of the poor man. Marxism appeared. It discovered what the root of the evil was and where the cure lay. It became the mighty force of the age. All this was the Tverskaya-Yamskaya of the age, and the filth, and the shining of sanctity, and the depravity, and the workers’ quarters, the leaflets and barricades.
“Ah, how beautiful she was as a young schoolgirl! You have no idea. She often visited her girlfriend in a house inhabited by workers of the Brest railway. That’s how the railway was named originally, before several subsequent renamings. My father, presently a member of the Yuriatin tribunal, worked then as a trackman on the station section. I visited that house and met her there. She was a young girl, a child, but the apprehensive thought, the anxiety of the age, could already be read on her face, in her eyes. All the themes of the time, all its tears and injuries, all its impulses, all its stored-up revenge and pride, were written on her face and in her posture, in the mixture of her girlish modesty and bold shapeliness. An accusation of the age could be pronounced on her behalf, with her mouth. You’ll agree, that’s not a trifling thing. It’s a sort of predestination, a marking out. One must have it from nature, one must have the right to it.”
“You speak wonderfully about her. I saw her at that time, just as you describe her. The schoolgirl was united in her with the heroine of an unchildish mystery. Her shadow flattened itself on the wall in a movement of apprehensive self-defense. That’s how I saw her. That’s how I remember her. You’ve put it strikingly well.”
“You saw and remember? But what did you do about it?”
“That’s another question entirely.”
“So, you see, all this nineteenth